1st October 2003 Archive

Iraq is up for sale, but not everyone is entitled to bid. A study by the George Soros-backed Open Society Initiative sheds some light on the current auction for Iraq's cellular telephony infrastructure, a market that it is estimated to be worth $6 billion by 2008. And it concludes that the bidding process - subject to several amendments already - has been geared to exclude local talent.

mmO2, the former mobile arm of BT Group, is on track to meet H1 financial targets after adding more than half a million new customers, and reporting an increase in the amount they are spending on mobile services. However, regulatory moves could hamper H2 growth in the highly competitive UK marketplace.

Britain is being robbed of its next generation of businesses as entrepreneurs report their planned ventures are being "delayed or destroyed" by the difficulties they face raising capital or credit to purchase essential IT kit, recent research claims.

Research by the U.K. government into a once-overlooked class of software vulnerability has surfaced three new security holes in the ubiquitous OpenSSL software package, according to advisories released Tuesday.

The auto industry goes open standards? This is possibly more earth-shattering than it would be if Bill Gates admitted he was wrong and gave all his money to Linus Torvalds. Because the auto industry could teach the PC business a few things about achieving lock-in via proprietary IT, and given the amount of IT that's been going into vehicles over the past few years, it's looked like it's getting worse, not better.

Sendo has largely won the first stage of its lawsuit against Microsoft, which yesterday failed to have the suit dismissed, or moved from Texas to Washington state. Sendo is suing former smartphone partner Microsoft for a range of alleged sins, the central claim being that the company swiped Sendo's expertise and technology and handed it over to rival, low-cost manufacturers.

A relatively small announcement out of Sun Microsystems to partner with VoiceGenie for speech software points to a large shift at the company to place Lintel servers ahead of Sparc/Solaris systems when the move makes sense.